Introduction
Probably like many of you, I've been lurking on Indie Hackers for quite some time now, and my obsession with this space has grown exponentially.
In this article I provide part 1 of who-knows-how-many on the journey of building my first product - bookjot.
I go into detail of how I came up with the idea, the landing page and initial validation process, and the conclusions I drew from all this.
Hopefully my experiences help you on your journey of launching that first product.
bookjot
After a couple days of brainstorming, I stumbled onto a problem I found myself having.
You see, I love to read a good book. And after finishing, I often find myself just dishing out my thoughts, probably onto a Google Doc or something. I then often go online to see what other people thought of the book, their opinions on whatever the author claimed, or how they saw a certain character, etc.
This process becomes a bit of a chore, however, due to me having to manually search for other people's opinions on Google, Reddit, blogs, etc. The experience isn't that great, either. My Google Drive is cluttered with all sorts of files and I have to dig through many folders to get to my book reports.
So I thought to myself, What if there was an app that provided such a platform? An app where you could go and write down your thoughts on the book/s you've read, and also have the ability to see others', comment on them, and discuss books together?
I wondered if there were any such apps already in existence. So far I've found Litsy and, of course, GoodReads
The key difference between bookjot and these other two is that bookjot is primarily for discussion. Not reviews, not photos, not anything besides the pure thoughts of the users. I want to market it towards entrepreneur types and other indie hackers as we all love the same kind of business/startup advice books like Purple Cow by Seth Godin and Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and these books have the greatest potential for some serious discussion.
Posts on Indie Hackers and /r/Entrepreneur
So I had this idea; I thought it was pretty cool; now I had to figure out whether other people would think the same. So I designed up a simple landing page, quickly whipped it up using plain old HTML and the Tachyons CSS library, and posted the link along with a couple words on both Indie Hackers and /r/Entrepreneur.
Here was what I posted to Indie Hackers:
And here was what I posted to /r/Entrepreneur:
Results
Sad to say that the Indie Hackers post didn't get much traction. 3 upvotes, but no comments 🙁
The post on /r/Entrepreneur, on the other hand, got quite a lot of feedback. They definitely didn't sugarcoat anything, which I was mad grateful for. Here are some of their comments:
The general consensus seems to be that people like the idea, but aren't willing to pay for something like this.
I agree. bookjot doesn't solve a dire problem, really. It's more of a nifty place that has potential to be quite engaging if enough users sign up.
As for email signups, I got a grand total of ... 2!
1 of them being my mom.
Yeah, not exactly booming here, but I'm still happy. Boy, when I saw that MailChimp email notification that I got a new subscriber ... I was beaming.
Conclusions
I see now that I shouldn't focus on generating revenue at this super early stage. That can come later with Amazon Affiliate links and perhaps some premium features that I haven't yet thought of. What I need to focus on now is acquiring users, a nice email list, and a general audience.
I guess this article is somewhat of an attempt at that, but it's also a way for me to give back to the Indie Hackers community. I've benefited handsomely from the interviews, forum posts, and articles on this platform, and I want to do my part and share my experiences too.
The next stage for bookjot?
Well, thinking super short term, say, next couple of days to weeks, I am going to make some much needed changes to the landing page. Add some more relevant information, change the pricing to $0, have the screenshots have relevant text in them and not lorem ipsum, etc.
After that, I want to try and drive some more traffic to the page. Have one more step of validation before I go ahead and full-fledge build this thing. I'll post on /r/books an extremely large community where I have the potential to reach many eyes.
If all goes well and bookjot is well received on /r/books, I'll launch into building. If not, well, I might launch into building anyway, since I kinda wanna see this come to life, even if it's just for me.
And of course, I'll be writing about my ventures every step of the way. So stay tuned 😎
- Eric